NEW YORK – These quarterly encounters invite comparisons between the two clubs contractually obligated to tangle in the Battle of the Burros, and we are pleased to announce that the local consumer’s basketball options are no longer limited to Overpaid Dreck and Overpaid Dreck Lite.

The difference is unmistakable, as we muck our way toward clairvoyance: The Nets are on a gradient that should get them very close to .500 by the All-Star break, given what they have on their schedule; and if the Knicks aren’t the league’s worst team right now, they’re strongly in contention for being the most unwatchable one.

The Nets — and this should not be confused with any great achievement — are 2½ games out of first place in their division, mostly because Toronto refuses to take itself seriously.

The Knicks, judging by the 103-80 ripsnorter they took from their Brooklyn brethren Monday, are sinking faster than Big Pussy Bonpensiero.

If you want to stick a number on it, this shall suffice: Since they gutted one out against Phoenix to win their fifth straight eight days ago, the Knicks have lost four in a row by an average of 18.8 points.

So they’ve hit the midseason checkpoint at 15-26, they have the league’s second-worst home record (7-15), and the only thing that prevents you from giving up entirely is that their next five games are against teams with a combined winning percentage of .365.

At the same time, the kind of testimony that came after the King Day Matinee humiliation tells you they are getting closer to getting their coach 86’d, if Jim Dolan is paying any attention at all.

“I think we came to play. They out-schemed us,” said Tyson Chandler, always the most candid voice in the room.

And later he said it again, when the Nets 49-percent efficiency (off 25 assists) and 14 3-pointers came up: “I have to go back and look at it on tape, but being out there it just seemed they were playing against our scheme,” he said.

It’s not that we were actively seeking an alley-oop, but it’s too irresistible to pass up: When your most honest guy says that your coach was outwitted by Jason Kidd, you have problems. And Chandler was actually being generous.

Mike Woodson’s primary issue is still the banana republic he calls an offense. The Knicks ran the same idiotic sets, time after time, and by now you know the routine: two or three passes followed by a contested jumper, without any inside-out action or attempt to create a double-team or mismatch.

It got so bad Woodson even dragged Beno Udrih out of the utility closet in the second quarter, when the game was already an 18-point runaway.

For his part, Woody dusted off the old platitudes about getting good shots, before realizing he couldn’t get away with it.

“There was not enough ball movement,” he concluded. “When we’re moving the ball and sharing it — cutting, with pace — we’re a pretty good offensive team. When we’re not, we’re a bad team. And you compound that by not defending, and it’s a bad combination.”

Sure, Philly comes in Wednesday, and their preschoolers will faint at the sight of Clyde and Spike courtside and let Carmelo Anthony make them look stupid for 48 minutes. But even if the Knicks go 14-for-whatever from deep, it’s fool’s gold. Their offense is fundamentally flawed, even when Melo feels like sharing it. He just has no one to share it with anymore, as Iman Shumpert, J.R. Smith and Raymond Felton (8-for-31) flaunted their usual marksmanship.

“It seemed like we couldn’t get into our offense the way we normally know how to,” said Anthony, who had 26 points on 19 shots. “On the defensive end, we (were) just scrambling. We couldn’t get into (any) defensive sets, and (we were) just scrambling and double teaming and switching — basically just scrambling the whole game.”

When Chandler’s analysis was relayed to him, Melo replied, “They played to the mismatches. That’s something that Jason does well, even when he was here. They forced us to double-team; as a result, they were able to swing the ball and they made open shots.”

More than should be tolerable, in fact.

So if this is a snapshot of where the teams are midway through this parade of horribles, they just honked at each other going in different directions on the FDR Drive.

“I know there was as lot of talk about the rivalry, but at this point we’re looking at the big picture,” said Nets ambassador Paul Pierce, whose team is 17-22. “We’re looking about how we’re going to develop, about how we’re going to get better, and to move up in the East.”